(OUR RACE IS OUR NATION! OUR BLOOD OUR HERITAGE! THERE IS STRENGTH IN NUMBERS, ANONYMITY IN THE MASS!- CDH)     In 2017, the tug of tribalism grew stronger

Jerry Adler
Yahoo NewsDecember 22, 2017

2018: The rise of tribalism in American politics
What do voters care about more: voting for their party or voting for candidates whose ideology they share? Watch Yahoo News Senior Editor Jerry Adler discuss the role of tribalism in American politics and what it may mean in 2018.

Among the unheralded winners of 2017 are political scientists, some of whom could spend the rest of their careers trying to explain Donald Trump’s rise and significance. Two of them, Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope of Brigham Young University, saw in Trump’s ever-shifting, ideologically flexible views “a unique opportunity” to test a crucial question in American politics: “To which do people give a higher priority: their ideology or their partisan affiliation?” They ask, Why is it that Republicans, self-described defenders of American values and interests, “became four times more likely to view Vladimir Putin favorably” from 2014 to 2016? What changed is that the Republican Party nominated someone who boasted about the mutual admiration he shared with the Russian dictator, illustrating Barber and Pope’s finding that “group loyalty” and “social identity” are more important in shaping voters’ views than their professed ideology.

Another term for “social identity” is “tribalism,” a word that has appeared in more than 60 articles in the New York Times so far in 2017, almost all in relation to American politics or culture. (It showed up just six times in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, including two references to American Indian tribes and one to an indigenous ethnic group in Venezuela.) As James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic, there are any number of synonyms for “tribe,” including “clique,” “ https://www.yahoo.com/news/2017-tug-tribalism-grew-stronger-100004695.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/2017-tug-tribalism-grew-stronger-100004695.html